Chris Hedges Joins the Tea Party

I recently read an essay at TruthDig.com in which Chris Hedges, a journalist and author active in Occupy Wall Street, argued that “People who work hard should get to keep the fruits of their labor. People who are lazy and irresponsible should suffer the consequences.” I was stunned. I had just done a discussion with him last week at the 92nd Street Y in New York, where we had what I thought was a very interesting and civil discussion about war, politics, and capitalism. We agreed on many points, such as that business is not intrinsically bad, but that corporations, when left unchecked by government, sometimes become super-organisms that can take over, corrupt the government, and then rig the system so that they get to pass on external costs to innocent bystanders. We both agreed that the financial sector was the most dangerous genie that had escaped from the bottle, wreaking havoc and suffering across the globe. But Hedges was well to the left of me.

So what was he doing spouting Tea Party lines, such as dismissing “slackers” and “cheaters” and everyone else who “drinks the water rather than carries it for the group.” He actually argued in his TruthDig essay that such people should be “denied social assistance in the name of fair play.”

Now, if you actually read Hedges’ essay, you’ll see that in the quotations I gave, he’s quoting or paraphrasing me. Those lines do really appear in his essay, so I was not wrong to quote them. But it was terribly wrong of me to suggest that Hedges was making those arguments himself, rather than reporting them as my beliefs, which he extracts from my book, which he was reviewing.

Yet this is exactly what Hedges did to me in his review. In The Righteous Mind, I try to help everyone understand the other side. I try to say what liberals, conservatives, and libertarians believe. For example, on p. 169 I’m trying to show the difference between liberal and conservative understandings of fairness. I quote some letters I received from angry conservatives who rejected my explanation of What Makes People Vote Republican. One letter said: “I vote republican because I’m against other people (authority figures) taking my money (that I work hard for) and giving it to a non- producing, welfare collecting, single mother, crack baby producing future democrat.” I then tried to analyze these conservatives’ notion of fairness. Here’s the key passage:

These emails were overflowing with moral content, yet I had a hard time categorizing that content using Moral Foundations Theory. Much of it was related to fairness, but this kind of fairness had nothing to do with equality. It was the fairness of the Protestant work ethic and the Hindu law of karma: People should reap what they sow. People who work hard should get to keep the fruits of their labor. People who are lazy and irresponsible should suffer the consequences.

I’ve never taken a journalism class, but I don’t think it was appropriate for Hedges to take that last sentence out of context and present it as though it was my personal belief.

Hedges does this to me over and over again. He repeatedly calls me a “social Darwinist,” by which he means the belief that we ought to let the poor starve to death, so that the gene pool can benefit from the “survival of the fittest.” Yet I do not believe this, and nowhere do I suggest anything remotely like this. My book is overwhelmingly descriptive. I’m trying to understand divergent moral matrices by climbing into them and seeing how they are built. Yet Hedges frequently takes my descriptions as though they were proclamations of my own personal values.

He also makes stuff up. I do talk about my urge, on and after 9/11, to display the flag and be a team player, even supporting the President. But Hedges then asserts: “Haidt became a lover of conservatism and nationalism when he became afraid. He embraced an irrational, not to mention illegal, pre-emptive war against a country, Iraq, that had nothing to do with 9/11.” Yet I am not now and never have been a conservative. Both before and after 9/11, I was a liberal Democrat, as I say in the book. I got into political psychology in 2005 specifically to help the Democrats do a better job of connecting with American morality. And while I supported the invasion of Afghanistan, I did not support the invasion of Iraq. Again, I’m no journalist, but I think that when journalists contradict their sources, they are supposed to have some evidence.

Hedges makes some valid criticisms of me. He’s right that I’m not sufficiently attentive to oppression by the powerful. He’s right that I’m too positive about social life in Bhubaneswar, India, in part because I spent very little time talking to people of very low caste. He could have written a compelling critique of my book from the perspective of the religious left, a critique I would have valued and learned from. But instead, he ended up demonstrating one of the principles of the book, which he quoted and rejected: “Conscious reasoning is carried out for the purpose of persuasion, rather than discovery.”

28 Comments

It seems clear that Hedges unable to discuss this material in a detached manner, and the only way that he can respond to your book is by derogating you. This is in keeping with Terror Management Theory; people often defend their worldview by derogating those who somehow undermine it.

Hedges is a classic example of social commentator who fails the ”ideological Turing test”. So under the sway of his own muddied but passionate lenses that he cannot even understand what anyone outside his matrix is even saying. Reading his essays and finding out at the end that he’s a pulitzer prize winning journalist and not a first year poli-sci student is truly a twist of Shyamalanian proportions. Sorry, mean but true.

It seems Hedges is a routine quote miner, as there are frequent examples of him wilfully misrepresenting Sam Harris in order to make his ideological points. I’ve got no respect for the man as a journalist – he’s self-serving and narrow-minded.

Jonathan, you might want to check out Isabel Penraeth at isabel.penraeth.com, who has been commenting on your work with (in my opinion) intelligence and creativity. She (and I) are Quakers and her comments (and mine) look at your work from the moral perspective of the Religious Society of Friends, expanding and adapting your frameworks to apply more clearly to Friends. We have mostly been talking about the differences between the moral frameworks held by Liberal Quakers and by the more Evangelical branch of Friends, and also the so-called Conservative branch, which has remained closest to the original Quaker impulse, which remains centered in Christ (unlike much of Liberal Quakerism) but still worships in waiting silence (the moderate and radical evangelical wings have adopted what we call programmed worship—services like other churches that include hymn-singing, Bible readings, collective vocal prayer, and sermons).

Thank you for this pointer, Stephen. Wow, Penraeth has been writing so much about morality and moral foundations theory. I will read more deeply. In the meantime, let me note that in one study I did, a cluster analysis of our subjects at Yourmorals.org, we found a cluster of people best labeled as “religious left” — they were high on all foundations, and higher than conservatives on care/harm. I suspect this would include Quakers, and would explain why Penraeth disagrees with my claim that liberals don’t value the binding foundations. Secular liberals value them less, but perhaps religious liberals are very different.
It’s publication #70 on this page:http://people.virginia.edu/~jdh6n/publications.html

I know that may seem glib, or smug, or an over-generalization, but it’s really not meant that way. Your experience with Hedges seems to be more the rule than the exception for anyone who does not toe the liberal line.

The Righteous Mind commits sacrilege against some of the most deeply held, most central, sacred values of the liberal matrix. Hedges is “circling the wagons” with an “irrational commitment” to those values.

This goes to an idea I’ve had for some time now.

It is my opinion that moral foundations undergird not only subconscious morality, but also conscious cognition. I suspect that moral foundations are not just the building blocks we use to construct our intuitive sense of right and wrong, they are also the cognitive tools we use to construct the logic we employ to defend and advance our morality, and to attempt to persuade others at least to understand it, if not to adopt it. Just as there are different subconscious, intuitive, moral matrices, there are also different conscious, rational, cognitive matrices.

In other words, I believe that moral foundations are not only the basis of the elephant’s natural instinct to like or dislike, approach or avoid, fight or flee, they are also the tools available to the rider in his or her function as the elephant’s press secretary. I further believe that only the tools employed by the elephant are available to the rider.

If my suspicion is true then it begs this question: How much of Hedges’ reaction can be attributed to the natural human tendency to “circle the wagons” around sacred values, and how much of it can be attributed to a cognitive tool kit which employs roughly only half of the foundations?

I’d love to see a book which explores conscious cognitive style as it relates to politics and religion with the same intellectual honesty and integrity that The Righteous Mind explores morality.

I would suggest that cognitive style is as much a cause of the political divide as is morality. The divide is due not only to the fact that we perceive the social world through different moral filters, it is also due to the fact that we process what we see with different cognitive capabilities and mechanisms. We literally reason differently. We talk past each other.

The metaphor of Flatland, which Haidt describes in Chapter 9 of his book The Happiness Hypothesis is possibly more apt than even he suggests. Conservative spheres have been trying to yank liberal squares from Flatland up to Spaceland for generations, and liberals have been consistently horrified by what they see, unable to process all six moral foundations with a perceptual framework and a reasoning mechanism that is built for only three, of those three primarily only one.

If we really want to build a door through the wall of the political divide then we have to do whatever we can to bridge the intuitive and cognitive gap.

It is my suggestion, therefore, that we teach Moral Foundations Theory in our schools. It is my opinion that while liberals and conservatives know WHAT they believe, very few of them (in equal numbers on both sides) understand WHY they believe what they do at a fundamental level. We tend to demonize that which we do not understand. I believe that the teaching of Moral Foundations Theory would increase greatly our understanding of one another, and would thus be an excellent vaccine against much of the demonization we see in political discussions today.

Moral Foundations Theory, (augmented by, for example, by Mercier and Sperber’s Argumentative Theory, along with the understanding of “Thinking Fast and Slow” as represented by the metaphor of The Rider and The Elephant) offers a deeper understanding of the human condition, and the motivations behind the things we say and do with, and to, each other, than has heretofore been available to us. Why not put it to practical use?

I believe that Moral Foundations have been an integral part of the history of mankind, and certainly of politics; that is, of group-level human interaction, for as long as we’ve been interacting. I also believe it is an integral part of how we get along with each other on an individual level. I think moral foundations are behind many of the events of history, and behind the great majority of our formal and informal social constructs and behaviors.

I believe, therefore, that a module on moral foundations theory belongs in, and the principles of moral foundations theory should be an integral part of, every social studies, history, economics, and even health class, in an age appropriate way, in every grade in every public school in this country. If we could somehow find a way to do this I think we would, in fact, diminish the width and depth of the political divide, and I would have more faith that our children, after they grow up and assume the reins of power, will make choices that will keep this country on a path of health and prosperity.

In my experience, biased logical lapses and such are part of the world of any moral matrix, not only the liberal one. Jon’s book has made more liberals defensive because it’s more focused on problems with liberal understanding, including his own previous understanding, not because liberals are naturally more defensive than conservatives.

Nicely put, SanPete. To the extent that my book is more critical of liberals than conservatives, I think it is because I’m telling my story, and how i have tried to argue with liberals. I agree that liberals are not more defensive than conservatives. Partisans on both sides use the same sorts of biased reasoning.

TIW: I am certainly in favor of teaching moral foundations theory in high school! I have long thought that our schools spend way too much time on math; few kids will ever need math beyond algebra. I think they should take more statistics instead. And in civics classes: yes, i’d love for kids to learn about ideology, and the differences between left and right, and I think moral foundations theory might help there. If any high school wants to experiment with creating such a module, I’d be glad to work with them.

I’ve long thought that a group of donors should form a foundation to promote civics education in public schools. Perhaps such a foundation exists. A clarification: this civics education program would not be an American History or government class. The idea would be to reinforce the foundations of our democracy, by getting our future citizens and leaders to understand that people and their shared commitment at the local level are the backbone of our national democratic strength. One of my fantasies (to be pursued, perhaps, after I retire) is to bring together parents, teachers and civic leaders in my community to develop a program of civics education for our kids at various grade levels, such that the kids will learn to apply large-scale learning about government, ethics and civic duty to resolving issues in their own communities.

Yes! I fully agree, we have an opportunity to teach civics as basic skills needed for a democracy. Not just how government works, but I’d say teach what the political parties stand for, and help students see both as sincere in their commitment to improving the country. Cultivate respect for both sides, which might innoculate kids against later demonization. It would certainly be more useful than teaching math beyond basic algebra.

Hedges’s review of RM shows the toll and dangers that serving as a prophet can take on a person. Hedges is, to my mind, not a “liberal”, but prophet, a prophet in the sense of moral outrage at injustice and calling to righteousness. But, I think, such an attitude can skew perspectives over time. Indeed, Hedges shows he is no longer a journalist (and I think that he’s written some outstanding pieces). His credibility slips dramatically with a piece like this. I congratulate Professor Haidt in practicing what he preaches about civility by his mild but justified response. I also appreciate Haidt’s insightful self-criticism. Frankly, I think that Hedges owes Haidt an apology, but can a prophet do that? It’s an awfully worldly and mundane action to take.

Jonathan Haidt writes:
“I had a hard time categorizing that content using Moral Foundations Theory. Much of it was related to fairness but this kind of fairness had nothing to do with equality. …”

That is an extremely interesting observation.

Any links to where you might have reflected more deeply on this particular conceptual puzzle?

By the way professor, although I am completely unsympathetic to your alluded to, implied, described, prescriptive morality, and not convinced that the “all in the same boat” strategy is a very compelling one for justifying it, I think that your descriptive work is quite interesting, and your grasp of the philosophical issues involved is better than I had originally imagined.

The idea that you are catching flack for being a deviationist progressive could be an interesting angle for exploring moral styles and substance as well. Of course you could simply write it off as the expression of a kind of misguided progressive tribalism devouring its own.

On the other hand a close examination of the conscious rationales employed by these kinds of thought police might yield up some interesting psychological insights into the most fundamental constituents forming their progressive worldviews, and, if you will allow the term, philosophical anthropology.

On the other hand maybe your view of the elephant makes that a pointless exercise.

I’m disappointed, but not surprised to hear Hedge’s doing this. This is poor journalistic ethics as far as I’m concerned. His elephant has made up his mind and his rider is doing an extremely poor job. But it proves what you argue; its about convincing others your own viewpoint, it’s not about telling the “truth.” With that note, excellent book by the way.

This comment is in response to Dr Haidt and Sanpete’s responses to my comment, above, that starts with “Welcome to the world of engaging with the liberal moral matrix”

I am posting down here at the bottom of the comments rather than directly to Dr. Haidt and Sanpete’s responses so I get the maximum possible width for this message and hopefully avoid some scrolling for anyone who may read this.

Dr. Haidt and Sanpete, I agree with everything both of you said.

What is dismaying and frustrating to me is that your comments have little to do with the main thrust of what I’m trying to say. In fact, it seems to me that you’re arguing against things I never said, and claims I never made.

With all possible respect and humility, it seems to me that both of you are making the same mistakes in your assessments and understanding of my views that the New Atheists make in theirs of religion, and what seems to me to be a common trait of literal-minded liberal thought. You’re missing the forest for the trees.

So let me try to be a little more direct. I am not saying that liberals are more prone to “biased logical lapses” than are conservatives; I am not saying that liberals are more defensive than conservatives; I am not saying that partisans on both sides don’t use the same sorts of biased reasoning. These are not liberal or conservative traits, they’re all human traits. I get that.

What I AM saying is that the root of the political divide is deeper than even The Righteous Mind exposes. I am saying that the root is ALSO in the difference between literal-minded rider-abstract “wiring” of the liberal mind and the concept-minded rider-experiential “wiring” of the conservative mind and that these things are inseparable from moral foundations. I am saying that if we seriously wish to reduce demonization and shrink the divide then we have to find a way, somehow, of getting the liberal elephant to be a little less literal, and see a little more of the forest.

I am saying that The Righteous Mind, by itself, or even supplemented with Dr Haidt’s numerous talks, explanations, and illustrations, is not enough to change behavior, any more than a class in ethics is sufficient to cause people to behave ethically. If we want to reduce demonization or shrink the divide we can’t just inform people about the differences, we must also change the path. That’s where my suggestion for teaching moral foundations comes in.

The “forest” I am trying to point out with my comments is that the metaphor of a matrix, or even a taste palette, is not sufficient to describe the real differences between the liberal and conservative minds, and thus the real reasons for the political divide, and consequently it is also insufficient to identify what is really needed if we are to shrink it.

A matrix is two dimensional. Dr. Haidt’s metaphor of the matrix of moral foundations, therefore, suggests that liberals and conservatives both live in two-dimensional moral and cognitive universes, albeit of different sizes, with a lot of overlap. An implication, intended or not, of this metaphor is that the two sides are equivalent but different; relative equals on either end of a moral/political see-saw (or teeter-totter), keeping it balanced. I offer for consideration the suggestion that the metaphor of a matrix is incorrect. It does not capture the full and true essence of the two minds, or of the divide.

What I suggest as an alternate, more correct, more accurate metaphor for describing the differences between conservatives and liberals is to say that they live in entirely different dimensional spaces, like the spheres and rectangles in the story “Flatland.” Unlike with a matrix, the realm of the former extends in directions that the realm of the latter is not even aware of. A rider-abstract, literal-minded, two-dimensional liberal “square” can neither truly understand nor “balance” an elephant-intuitive, conceptual-minded, three-dimensional “sphere.” As long as we continue to labor under the false impression that the two sides are both two-dimensional matrices which represent Yin/Yang style equivalent-but-different opposites we will continue to be stymied in our efforts to bridge the divide. We may as well conclude equivalence between apples and kittens, and try to get them to get along better.

There is, practically speaking, little hope of reducing demonization or shrinking the divide unless and until Flatlanders learn to appreciate all of the dimensions of Spaceland. Changing elephants’ paths in this way can’t be done with a single book like The Righteous Mind, or even with a single course like in the ethics example. It takes time, patience, and persistence, thus my recommendation for education, starting in the earliest grades, on MFT and related topics.

Maybe I need some help getting my ideas across. Maybe a better writer can say it better than I can. Yuval? Jonah? Thomas? George? A little help? No?

Then how about this.

R. R. Reno reviewed The Righteous Mind in the June 1 edition of “First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life.” In that review, entitled “Our One-Eyed Friends” Reno writes:

Seeing with the social [i.e., the binding foundations] as well as with the individual [i.e., the individualizing foundations] eye, as it were, unites American conservatives with the vast majority of human beings who in all known cultures place a great deal of importance on the “binding” foundations. All known cultures, that is, except the subculture of people who grow up in Western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic societies, WEIRD societies, as Haidt calls them.

This subculture, the liberal subculture that formed Haidt in his childhood and throughout most of his education, produces people like the Penn undergraduates who say that it’s alright to have sex with chickens as long as nobody is harmed. They are statistically weird, “outliers,” as social scientists say. Unlike the vast majority of humanity, they’ve been socialized to disregard their emotional responses when faced with offenses to loyalty, authority, and sanctity. They’re blinded in the moral eye that sees the social valences of moral situations.
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Haidt’s research suggests an inconvenient truth about our divided country. The ill-tempered rancor stems in large part from the moral myopia of liberals. They have a great deal of difficulty grasping the “binding” moral concerns that engage American conservatives, especially when those concerns are heightened and given shape by religion. And their response to this difficulty has been to summarily dismiss those who see with two eyes. Those of us who are concerned about loyalty, authority, and sanctity are subject to rhetorical extermination: We’re denounced as “not mainstream.”

And not just American conservatives. Liberals tend to be unable to muster much respect for the moral outlook of billions and billions of people throughout the globe whose traditional societies train them to use both eyes. Hence, for example, the Obama administration’s desire to make the advancement of homosexual rights part of our foreign policy. It’s just the latest part of the WEIRD subculture’s effort to expand the influence of it’s individualistic ethic.

Thus the profound problem we face. Liberalism is blind in one eye–yet it insists on the superiority of its vision and its supreme right to rule. It cannot see half the things a governing philosophy must see, and claims that those who see both halves are thereby unqualified to govern.

If there is to be any hope of reducing demonization or shrinking the divide then it’s the liberal path that most needs to change, and it is the liberal path that needs to change the most. The liberal rider and elephant must learn how to see with both eyes.

The opposite proposition, that of changing the path of the conservative rider and elephant so they see with only one eye is a not sequitur, for at least two reasons (besides, of course, the obvious one of having to, metaphorically speaking, poke one eye out of every conservative). First, Dr. Haidt’s research has shown conservatives already do see out of the “individual” eye. Second, it would be the equivalent of asking conservatives to un-see what they have seen, unlearn what they have learned, and un-know what they know, from countless years of natural selection – the source of moral foundations – about the true depth and breadth of fundamental human nature.

This does not mean, not for an instant, that conservatives are above it all and don’t need some path changing of their own. I think it is safe to say that many conservatives don’t know about MFT, the rider and the elephant, or the argumentative theory either, and that if they did then they too might be a little less quick to demonize, a little more willing to entertain ideas from the other side, a little better equipped to suppress their own knee-jerk reactions (another trait that’s not liberal or conservative, but human), a little less prone to pull farther and harder to the right in reaction to liberals pulling so hard to the left, and a little more prone to seek balance between both sides, as is their natural predisposition due to their inherent balance of all the moral foundations. After all, liberalism is half of conservatism.

Elephants won’t just change their minds in response to a well-reasoned argument. But with consistent, reinforced over the long term, training and education their paths can be changed. The way we can do that is to teach MFT, Rider/Element, Argumentative Theory, and probably more, from the earliest grades onward in our public schools.

We simply cannot reasonably expect our kids to learn how to get along better if they continue to be oblivious to the reasons it can be so hard to do.

Very late to this party. I’ve done a number of blog threads where we’ve discussed ideas from the Righteous Mind. So sadly, I am extremely unsurprised at what Hedges has apparently done. We had one or two drive-by disparaging contents of RM that were very nasty, and without any reference whatsoever to content in the book. No engagement. Just rejection. You might as well accept the fact that wandering off the rezz is unforgivable: you are an apostate now.

It has also been fairly easy for me to anticipate the sort of triumphalism from conservatives that I see up above: “See? Conservatives are normal, liberals are deviants.” You’ve been rejected by the left and weaponized by the right. This really shouldn’t surprise you though, not if you read your own book, LOL.

What I’d like to do with the Righteous Mind is try to incorporate some of it into a freshman class on critical thinking. Most importantly, I’d like students to take out one of your ideas for a metacognitive spin: in particular, the idea that we react with an immediate intuitive lean, and then our reasoning is post hoc.

Unfortunately, I’d first have to get a section of CT to teach. Right now I’m on math. I did take a look at the predominant text being used to teach critical thinking at my school, and I had a very similar reaction to the ones you spoke about in moral psychology: too rational, no passion. Too much Kohlberg, no Durkheim. All rider, no clue about the elephant. Doomed to substantial failure on that basis.

I just finished and learnt a great deal from the Righteous Mind, perspectives I think I’ll take with me for the rest of my life. Thank you. I just googled for criticism of it, as seems prudent (no offence intended!). Chris Hedges’ review was shockingly misrepresentative. I would be terribly embarrassed to be him and such a sure case of the elephant leading the rider. Nice response though.

All the speculation on Hedges “circling the wagons” is OK as an exercise of the ideas proposed in “The Righteous Mind” but I suspect something much simpler. Hedges did not read the book. He just took some quotes and cobbled them into a a polemic against something that bore no relation to the source material.

I’m not convinced of much of anything Haidt says in his book and think that Hedges is genarlly a more rigorous thinker. I didn’t like Haidt’s book because of it’s, what I’ll call, sophomoric tone and it’s reliance on rehashing of others work. I do agree with Hedges that Haidt’s theory does not mesh anything. Morality is too subjective, as it should be, and the main thing lacking in Conservative thought is just that, autonomy, which they reject for dogmatic beliefs based on tradition that they defend because they’re afraid of change. As far as Liberals go, they may have only one main moral dimension but it’s the primary one and the fact that Conservatives pay little attention to it is the best argument for the primacy of Liberalism as a more humane and enlightened position whether philosophical or political. However and ironically it turns out that this is exactly what weakens Liberalism. In the same sense that most of what passes for Christianity emphasizes dogma at the expense of Christ’s fundamental message which is to love and forgive everyone even Conservatives for their neglect of caring and their uncharitable and misunderstood judgements of the less worthy. The trouble with Conservatives is that they act like there’s a level playing field in society that automatically makes everyone equal and nothing could be further from the truth. They know nothing of the Social Sciences and it’s contribution to the field of human knowledge. Their lack of knowledge and their insistence on keeping things the way they want them is their downfall.